One night we were at KC’s apartment (of KC and the Sunshine Band). It wasn’t long before Rick Springfield, already a teen phenom at the time, started hitting on young, beautiful Val. She was still fifteen, maybe sixteen years old. She came up to me and whispered, “Mack, we gotta get out of here.” I said, “But he’s so cute!” Still, we ran out the door and drove away very fast. She was freaked out, but to me the parties, the flirtations, the hookups, the mad-dash escapes—it was all a hilarious adventure. That would be our mismatched dynamic for years. I was impulsive, carefree, careless. Val definitely partied too, but compared to me she was restrained and responsible. Our differences—much like our characters—would grow more dramatic over the years and at times pull us apart. But, like the sisters we played on TV, we had a bond that would always exist, no matter what.
Valerie and I always laugh about the fact that when it came to guest stars on the show, I always got the guys. Until Scott Colomby came along. He was really cute, and he went for Val. They dated for several years. My on-set romances tended not to last so long. My boyfriends were all casual accessories. A handsome, soft-spoken guy named Robby Benson came on for an episode called “The College Man.” In the episode he is my date, but he goes for my mother—and she seems to like the attention. After the taping, Robby asked me out and we started dating. It was all very chaste. We’d go to his apartment—it was by the beach somewhere—and he’d play me songs that he’d written. One of them, “Mr. Weinstein’s Barbershop,” got stuck in my head and never left.
Anyway, we’d been dating for about a month and hadn’t had sex yet. I partied but I wasn’t promiscuous, in part because I still thought of myself as the Kid. After a date, Robby was dropping me off back at my house when he said, “I have this itch, I really need to scratch it.”
I said, “So scratch it.”
He said, “No, you don’t get it,” and raised his eyebrows suggestively. After more eyebrow raises than any dignified man should have to exercise, I finally caught his drift. That kind of itch. I could feel Aunt Rosie’s eyes boring through the closed door of the house.
I said, “Oh, I gotta go.” Something in me shut down and I didn’t go out with him again.
I was a good girl, but I had my moments. One of the most memorable came two years later when I was on hiatus in New York. Dad and Gen’s latest digs in New York were a penthouse on the Upper East Side. I rented the penthouse next door. I was rarely there—I was clubbing at night, sleeping during the day, back and forth to L.A.—but I had more money than I knew what to do with. I never got around to furnishing that apartment, so I always ended up crashing at my dad’s.
For New Year’s Eve I went with Dad and Genevieve to a crazy party at their friend Wendy Stark’s penthouse on Fifth Avenue. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were there, the editor of Rolling Stone Jann Wenner, and other luminaries. Jeffrey stayed home at our dad’s apartment. He wasn’t as comfortable partying with Dad’s friends as I was. At midnight, when the Central Park fireworks started going off, Dad got a call. It was Jeffrey, who said, “It’s the start of World War III. There are bombs going off every where. There are gunshots. I’m hiding in the closet. I’m terrified.” It must have been the cocaine talking. Dad just said, “Look, you’re on your own, kid.” That was one of his favorite expressions.
A few days later we went to a party at the gorgeous Central Park West home of our dear friends Lenny and Marsia Holzer. (The same Marsia who a few years earlier had, with her then-boyfriend Yipi, fled the chaos at 414 St. Pierre.) Lenny was Dad’s big shooting-up buddy who has now been clean and sober for five million years and is a highly paid interventionist. Mick and Jerry Hall lived in the same building.
Jerry was on her way somewhere, maybe Central America. She stopped by the party wearing an elegant hat, said, “Now you all have a good time” in her soft Texan drawl, and left.
The party went on, but at some point in the evening Mick decided he wanted a tuna salad sandwich. Dad was a connoisseur of white-trash food, so he insisted on making the Phillips family tuna salad recipe for Mick. Dad, Mick, and I went down to Mick and Jerry’s apartment. Mick opened a can of tuna, then looked for the mayo. There was no mayo. Thank you, Jesus, there was no mayo. Mick said, “John, go upstairs and see if Lenny and Marsia have any mayo.” Dad left, and the minute the door shut behind him, Mick locked it and turned around to face me. He said, “I’ve been waiting for this since you were ten years old.” I was eighteen. Eight years is a long time to wait. We went into his and Jerry Hall’s bedroom and had sex in their bed.
In the middle of our tumble my dad came back and started knocking on the door, yelling, “You’ve got my daughter in there!” It wasn’t “Look, you’re on your own kid” this time, but I imagine he was more annoyed at losing the chance to show off his tuna salad recipe than genuinely concerned about the defiling of his daughter. We ignored him and he finally went away.
That night I slept in that lux, illicit bed. I’d known Mick since I was a kid, and maybe most people think that their parents’ friends are old and gross. But this was Mick Jagger. Mick Jagger! He was hot. He had the most perfect ass in history. (I’m sure he still has a perfect ass given that he taught me how to do squats so many years ago.)
The next morning we put on big fluffy white robes. (You have to wonder if every girl who stayed at the Mick Hotel got one.) He went into the kitchen and came back with a tray carrying tea, toast, and fresh strawberries. The phone rang. Mick handed it to me. It was my father. He said, “I’ve been up all night worrying. Was he nice to you?”
I said, “Dad, I’m fine. We’re having tea. I’ll see you later.”
I was proud of my conquest, or of having been conquested, but I never intended to make it public. And then, many years later, I was talking to a friend, Mary, from the TV Guide channel for an interview. I was so naive. I honestly thought we were off the record when I told her about my night with Mick, but apparently not. TV Guide ran that story as the headline. In quick order it turned into a tabloid free-for-all. It was in the Enquirer. Jay Leno joked about it in his opening monologue. I got it: inside dirt about a globally famous rock star is money. But it turned into something I never wished it to become.
I was a good girl, but I knew a golden opportunity when I saw it, even if it came disguised as a tuna salad sandwich.
10
The times when I was on vacation from One Day at a Time float to the top of my memories, the same way that for most people the details of summer jobs prevail over the day-to-day of high school math class. When One Day at a Time was on hiatus from its second season and I was seventeen, I spent a couple months in New York. Dad’s apartment was a bold display of unrepentant drug use, a horror show. There were drug dealers coming and going day and night. The once-beautiful apartment had quickly turned into a slum. Papers, clothes, unfinished projects, food, trash—if something got put down on any surface, there it remained indefinitely. Dad and Gen had a double-sided adjustable bed. When it got stuck with one side down flat and the other side raised like a hospital bed, with the head up high and a bend for someone’s knees, it remained that way, a disjointed symbol of their out-of-kilter life until they moved.
The apartment had a spiral staircase to the second floor, a cruel joke to play on heroin addicts. They fell down the stairs constantly. There was blood on the walls and needles on the floor. AIDS wasn’t a fear yet, but junkies still liked to use new needles. Clean, new needles have sharp points, and sharp points are better for finding veins. And if you’re using a new needle every time, and if you shoot up every twenty minutes, and if there are two or three of you, then you use up to 150 needles a day. You don’t throw them away, because where are you going to throw away that many needles without attracting attention or feeling paranoid that you might? The needles accumulate quickly. You had to watch where you stepped in that apartment.
On one of the first days of my visit, I came into the apartment and found my six-year-old brother, Tam, alone. He was sitting
on a windowsill using a syringe for a squirt gun.
My father made no secret of his heroin use. One time I knocked on his door to see if he was ready to go out and he said, “Not now, darling. Daddy’s shooting up.” He loved to tell that story. Dad was so fucked up. It was the junkie routine: sleeping for days, shooting up for days, spending time in closets, stumbling around—mundane on paper but painful to watch.
I was horrified at the scene I’d come upon. Richard, one of my friends in L.A., claimed to have invented freebasing— smoking cocaine in its base form—though it’s likely that what he meant was that he introduced a whole bunch of people to the process. A dubious claim to fame. When I told him how worried I was about Dad, Richard suggested that we introduce him to freebase. I guess he thought that once someone did base they wouldn’t need heroin. For some reason I bought that logic—I guess I was desperate for an answer, and cocaine, unlike heroin, was the devil I knew—so I flew Richard into New York to make freebase for Dad. Then Dad became a freebase head.
Dad wasn’t alone: I had started using coke regularly too, though I never shot up—until I did. I carried around a vial of cocaine in my pocket as casually as if it were a pack of cigarettes. I often tried to mooch drugs off my father. Sometimes he complied, sometimes he said no. Did he think they were bad for me or was he concerned about his supply? My best guess is the latter. One night my friend Rae-Dawn Chong—Tommy Chong’s daughter, who would later appear in Quest for Fire, The Color Purple, and many other movies—and I were going to Tavern on the Green, the famous restaurant in Central Park, for dinner. Before we left I found Dad asleep on the knees-up side of the broken bed. Excellent—when he was half asleep was always a good time to ask Dad for drugs. He mumbled, “Bindles on the bedside table.” I grabbed one and we left.
Rae-Dawn and I were in a cab speeding through Central Park. We slid the partition between us and the driver closed, huddled on the floor of the cab, and snorted the coke. By the time we got to Tavern on the Green we knew something was terribly wrong. We were nodding out, running to the bathroom to throw up, knocking things over. We were both recognizable, both very young, and both accustomed to snorting shitloads of cocaine. But what we had snorted was definitely not cocaine. This was heroin. We were seriously fucked up. In fucking Tavern on the Green. It was a bad, bad scene. It wasn’t long before we were asked to leave. And I don’t remember anything after that.
I was concerned about Dad, but I wasn’t worried about myself. I told myself that it was the needles that were the problem, though now I see that helping Dad, wanting to save Dad, was another way of avoiding my own issues.
In mid-July there was a blackout in New York. Rosie called Dad in a panic. “Where is she? Put her on the phone.” My father couldn’t find me anywhere. Hours passed with no word from me. Rosie kept calling, frantic with worry. Maybe I was stuck in an elevator somewhere. Maybe someone had abducted me! Dad called around, but nobody had seen me. The blackout ended after a day, but there was still no sign of me.
The next day I came out of the back bedroom, yawning. Dad and Gen ran to me, checking to see if I was okay and asking where I’d been for two days. I said, “I was asleep. Back there.” I gestured toward the back bedroom of my father’s apartment. I’d been right there in the apartment the whole time. I missed the whole blackout. Blacked out.
The drugs that had for so long set the scene for my family’s festive, extravagant lifestyle were moving into a lead role. Drug use was no longer recreational. It was central. It was necessary. We were all in deep and it was starting to show. Genevieve, Jeffrey, and I were all entwined with the same lover—cocaine. It was a complicated relationship, an endless cycle of give and take, the instant thrill and surge of ecstasy that cocaine promised, delivered, and revoked all in the course of half an hour— after which the race to recapture that unimaginably good feeling, which only cocaine could offer, and did, would begin, again and again, until the supply ran out and the thrill turned to a dark, hollow absence, a bleakness so opposite and dreadful that more cocaine wasn’t just desirable, it was necessary.
That necessity became a driving force in the household. There were no boundaries whatsoever. My dad stole a bunch of money from me that summer. When I first came back to New York, Dad had taken me to get a thousand dollars’ worth of American Express traveler’s checks. You’re supposed to sign them twice—once when you buy them and once when you sign them over to the person you want to pay. But my father had me sign all of them twice. He was the kind of person who made you feel like an idiot if you contradicted him—I never did. I just double-signed the checks. But I was no dummy. I knew what he was about, so I slept with my purse clutched under my arm. I woke up one morning and the checks were gone.
If I had any coke, Gen would swoop past, grab it, and disappear. Dad would chant, “Genevieve’s a coke junkie, Genevieve’s a coke junkie,” but the playground taunting belied the escalating insanity. When you use coke intensely you go into cocaine psychosis, you start thinking there are things on you—bugs or threads or strings. Right after you shoot up you notice that something is on you, and you absolutely believe it’s there. It’s so real that no matter how many times you’ve come down off coke and realized it was a hallucination, no matter how many times you’ve talked to other cokeheads about it, read about it, written yourself notes to remind yourself not to believe the illusion, when it happens again you are convinced that no matter what went before, this time it is absolutely real. People tear themselves apart trying to free themselves from those imagined creepy-crawlies.
Dad and Gen both went deep into a coke-bug obsession. I came home after being on a several-day tear with crazy people. Dad said, “I’ve got to talk to you. It’s very important.” He led me to the library and sat down behind his desk. I was thinking, Here comes the key to life. But he leaned toward me conspiratorially and said, “I found out where they’re coming from. My nose.” He was talking about the coke bugs. Dad must have liked the expression of confusion and disappointment on my face because a few days later he sat me down in a similarly serious way and said, “I have something very important to tell you and I want you to remember this always. Fifth Avenue separates the East and West sides of Manhattan.” Another time he sat me down for this weighty revelation: “The farther off from England, the closer is to France.” Each time he did this I was really expecting something redemptive and life changing, the I love you and I’m sorry moment that should have been forthcoming. But eventually it dawned on me that he was just amusing himself.
So Dad made the historical discovery that coke bugs were coming from his nose, and he was a man of action. I went about my business, and the next time I came home, as God is my witness, I came into the apartment to find my father, naked but wrapped from head to toe in Saran Wrap. He had left slits for his mouth and nose. I was sixteen, and for all the unorthodox parenting I’d experienced, I wasn’t in the habit of seeing my father naked, and I expected to keep it that way. I said, “What are you doing?”
Dad said, “I’m killing the bugs. They can’t breathe.” Okay …
I was happy to be back in L.A., back at One Day at a Time, back with Rosie, Patty, and Nancy. One night soon after I came home, my cousins, Rosie, and I were sitting around cooking dinner. We had an ongoing fixation with artichokes. We’d already made our favorite dip: Miracle Whip mixed with Spike (a spice mixture), and there were four artichokes steaming in the pressure cooker. The den of that house in Beachwood Canyon was classic seventies. There was a built-in bench bordering the TV area. Bench doesn’t quite do it justice—it was so deep that if you sat with your back against the wall, your feet didn’t reach the edge of the seat. There were cushions that made it loungy, and the whole thing was covered in brown shag carpet that spilled over its edge, down to and across the floor.
We relaxed on that comfortable built-in, drinking wine while the artichokes cooked. Then, all of a sudden, the top of the pressure cooker blew off. It narrowly missed decapitating Rosie. Artichoke
went everywhere—the crew on One Day at a Time couldn’t have planned an exploding artichoke scene better. The four of us rolled on the floor, clutching our bellies, we were laughing so hard. When we finally pulled ourselves together, we spent the next two hours picking artichoke out of every inch of that brown shag carpet. It was a mess, but it felt like good, clean fun.
I loved living with my aunt and cousins, but I was almost eighteen and ready to live on my own. My manager, Pat McQueeney, found a beautiful house in Laurel Canyon for me to buy. It was a small house with a galley kitchen, but it had great big windows, a terraced backyard, and an amazing view of L.A. Pat and I went shopping for fabrics and carpeting, and our purchases reflected a compromise between Pat’s elegant sensibility and my thrift-store chic vibe. I chose carpeting in hunter green, a color I’ve always loved, and Pat selected custom drapes to match the custom bedspread and shams.
My cousin Patty and I ventured to an auction to buy chairs for my living room. I’d never been to an auction before, but I’d seen a photo of these dwarf wing chairs covered in a Missoni-inspired knit fabric that had subdued green tones matching my carpet. At the auction, I was so nervous to bid that I kept shoving the cards with the numbers on them to Patty so that she could bid for me. Finally, she summoned the courage to win me my chairs. We put them on either side of the living room fire-place.
Just before my birthday, Rosie moved out of Beachwood to a place in Venice where she would live for the rest of her life. Patty went to live with her boyfriend Brad, and Nancy got her own place. Before we all dispersed, we had a crazy Say Good-bye to Beachwood party that did my father proud. There were people running through the hills on acid, chasing coyotes. And then I turned eighteen.
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